The DARPA Trauma Pod project was featured at the 2007 DARPATech conference. We worked on a small part of the project, which was led by SRI and involved a large team of contractors and universities. The popular Mechanics article described this way.

“A single human will operate the robot remotely during surgery, but Trauma Pod will be able to perform a number of functions, such as fluid administration and surgical assistance, autonomously. The goal is to stabilize injured soldiers as quickly as possible, and previous Trauma Pod designs have included related systems that evacuate the patient. Giroir said that a prototype will be delivered to troops within two years.”

I found the Trauma Pod system to be a very impressive distributed system that comprised multiple autonomous robotic systems, multiple sensing systems, speech understanding, plan recognition and much more.